


Soteriology of the Coherent

by Mariqnne (Daytura)



Category: Realm of the Mad God (Video Game)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-07
Updated: 2021-03-06
Packaged: 2021-03-12 11:46:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 6,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29259939
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Daytura/pseuds/Mariqnne
Summary: The final years of the regime of the Mad God are troublingly mild, and without anyone to offer them true prophecy, almost all of the members of Oryx's insidious sanctuary remain as they are. But Archbishop Leucoryx's influence and powers begin to wane, and so, he takes across the Realm in a spur of solution.[NOTE: THIS WORK IS NOT FINISHED BY ANY MEANS AND I HAVE NO BETA. Expect retroactive updates and--as of this March 9th, 2021--an upcoming rewrite to make the work more accessible for budding readers.]
Kudos: 2





	1. Introductory (Leucoryxan) Doctrine

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first "real" fanfiction and while I'm honored to issue out the first work of this AO3 fandom tag and perhaps set a niche precedent for works to come, how far I go is still up in the air. Leucoryx isn't exactly the best to work with. ;)
> 
> Narration inspired by Margaret Atwood's venerable Aunt Lydia in _The Testaments_. Ms. Atwood, thank you.

On the off-chance that my eyes finally slip shut and the migraines let up long enough for me to succumb to the firm grasp of rest, I dream. And in these dreams, I almost always see the same conjuration of the heretical, that symphony of sights and shades, playing out like recollections of a luscious previous life. I say “like” for good reason, however. My expanded consciousness has created great pockets of cognitive space that bits and pieces of my mortality hangs within, and I suppose within such a context that the unconscious simmer _are_ recollections of a previous life. While this might not be an autobiography of my life just yet, please, I implore you to stay a while.

Awareness comes to me first--I’m firmly planted on the ground in a wide area. The slate gray dirt is as smooth and platonic as the rocks and crystals that dot this expanse, and the air is laden with drying coldness. Each time I arrive at this place, I suspect the bitter weather conditions have not been kind to the latent minerals and organic composition. The long trail of my purple robe whips around me in erratic directions, and in my hands is a burgundy tome clasped up to chest with hand tightly clutching a wand, crossing it. The mint green tip pokes dangerously close to my soft chin, but awareness tells me it’s my most prized possession. As an item of foresight, there are certain properties of the matrix of the wood itself that cause it [ to glow sprightly in the present moment ](https://www.realmeye.com/wiki/wand-of-ancient-warning) before catastrophe sweeps in, donning a bonnet of misery and anguish.

There are some things that come to mind at that moment. I am young. The _realm_ is young. Ghosts were not ghosts, flora were vibrant and wonderful, and an esteemed gladiator was quickly gaining status as he swept through the land brandishing the hope of a brighter, less fearful future at the end of his sword. But in lacking the semi-omniscience I have in my waking mind, there’s no way I can discern if I really am living my mortal years again. As I stand, I’m in the mountains, an area high above the rest of the realm filled with the worst of the worst monsters, and ~~I’ve been there for~~ ~~I’ve been involved~~ I’ve visited the place at multiple points in Realm history. This could very well be a malformed memory taking place in Oryx’s reign even though I’m ostensibly in my younger self’s body.

Naturally, I begin to walk. The mountains aren’t normally so quiet, but monsters lurking in such a dangerous location tend to be more careful about their movements than the ones in the forests and plains--perhaps to ensnare budding heroes, beckoning them closer to their dripping orifices, because they were hungry just as we were, if only in a different need for sustenance.

Needless to say I didn’t find much. Just more soil and rocks.

It would be at that point where I stop walking and sit myself down on a larger stone. Conventional dream mechanics would implore me to saunter over to a river and look at myself in the wavering reflection, and subsequently incur the sharp dive into the darker parts of my spirit, but mental fortitude has always been that running trait I went by even while in the flesh. (Tangentially, I must also state that I use “the flesh” for dramatic effect. Gods still have some sort of tangibility in order to interface with the material world, and for me in particular, I have to be involved in cuboid affairs often.) Time would ooze and I held my place in the approximate area. Better a boring dream than a rambunctious nightmare: I would sigh a few times to clear the air, maybe even lean back a bit too far on this rock and almost hit my head on the ground, or more logically fire bolts of shots across the land without any of them striking anything.

Perhaps if I could muster a bit of my current idealism in these dreams, I’d kneel a while and let my fingers fold through the soft, pillowy soil of this barren landscape, if only to have something new to do. The rapid decline of new sensory detail since my recent move into the chambers of this sanctuary I’m writing in has unwittingly reestablished a fault of gratitude and romanticism within me. ~~He used to enjoy that kind of softness, but he seems less receptive now, did I not express that enough in his presence? Perchance he will not take well to it now...~~ I diverge. I suppose it’d be more accurate to say that my attention to detail has lent me a desire to look for lively trivialities in my day-to-day, than actual things to write about in my other texts. Then again, Oryx could consider that attention to the minutiae to be stepping on the toes of my colleague, Treasurer Gemsbok, whose sharp mind works quickly to manage calculations and statistics from the constantly shifting streams of numerical data. We’re gods of--things, now. With all the mental duress that comes with that, wouldn’t it be a mess of it all if we brazenly knocked heels with each other and exchanged topical duties like cards? Or at least that seems to be the consensus.

Then someone would come to walk to me. It’s always from the same selection of five people: my colleagues and Oryx.

My hand’s become enveloped in the floral: I’m getting ahead of myself. Details will all be revealed in due time, my dear reader, and shouldn’t you know there’s no use dithering around with fools?

It would only be until my visual range started to slip that the more conventional darkness would come to sweep me again, changing and morphing until it became the darkness behind eyelids. In time, these eyelids would open up into the dim blue tint embedded into the walls of my bedroom. And from there I would drag my eyes around and around my abode, trying to look and take in everything that vision granted me, if only to forget for one second the rest of the space on the bed. And with that brief moment of freedom passed, I would turn my body slowly, neck and head in tandem to the desolation building up, which would then reach a peak in the neatly-pulled sheets and fluffed up pillow.

 _Someday, Oryx,_ I would murmur in a locale in my mind tucked away from his omnipresence, _someday you will see me wake_.

Though, if we must be technical, I was already awake--and nigh-flagrantly before him regardless.


	2. A Twilight Meeting

Awakening is always so troubling, even in the dullest of dreams. It isn’t the process of coming to wakefulness than it is the awareness that everything is happening again; that unconsciousness is not a break from an axis-stricken world but a brief, beautiful forgetting of it. 

~~I must apologize for my dim tone and bare account of the metaphysical. Much of my philosophy is self driven, and you’ll find that in such a character like me, I am not so prone to glee than I am contentment. Then again that’s not so true at all, is it? You know who I am, and as such, you will know the tales of the victims of my cathedral. Assertions of beams of light so energetic it scorches bone and muscle. Insistence of beams of darkness so insidious it procures an instant trip to the void wherever it strikes. I hear you. I hear them. And while I can’t say I am ashamed for such violent acts of~~

I must apologize for the lack of transparency in my previous escapade. I’m still shaken from today’s banquet with my lord, even as the lines on my letters are still adorned with curlicues. (Hint to my studious suitor: Look closely, there’s a bit of waver to these lines.) It seems that every moment I spend longer in the vicinity of an entity so _steeped_ in exaltation incurs the sensation that I’m not supposed to be there. As much as I am enthralled to this lustrous force, I am equally as able to forsake it. Leader Dammah, Guard Beisa, and Overseer Gemsbok may be able to leave their remaining imperfections and attain unconditional immortality if Oryx allows them to, but I will always be a demigod. Even now, the scene burns itself into my mind.

“Leucoryx, what is the status of the congregation?” he booms across the table to me. He often asks this to me whenever I dine with him, and I always answer sweetly, but in recent days my fingers are beginning to twitch. So too does my vision stutter and click like a mechanical aperture as I attempt to drag my eyes back to his haloed face.

Instead, I settle for the slightly less radiant golden horns.

Sucrose and frosting line my tongue. It’s trivial to conjure elation and an upwards quirk of the mouth even towards such an imposing figure. “The congregation is as loyal as ever, my Lord!” 

His gaze breaks briefly from me as I try to keep my pupils from stepping on his. It’s a new behavior--no, no, it’s an old behavior, but it bubbles forth so rarely even in his sobriety that it may well be vestigial. It’s a mark of pensivity, and I know that because a drunken Oryx would drag his eyes around and around once the first break of contact is made. If there’s a flash, then it’s not a flash of distraction. It has to be pensivity.

“How?” he replies, continuing to look off-angle to my face.

I take a pause to collect my words. “My lord, as you know, I am well-versed in the workings of the mind. My ascended form allows me to occupy a significant amount of control over it, in fact. Each night I walk through their chambers opening my inner ears to their unconscious, and there are no more than zero detractions from my teachings as they rest.”

The exhale comes roughly out of my mouth. With that lunge of confidence also comes the extra, “If I am not a god, then I am a most excellent teacher.”

He finally flicks his eyes back to my line of vision. (That physically cannot happen, but it does.) His helmet makes his face impossible to read, even for me, but in those softly glowing amber orbs comes a very, _very_ familiar sensation. It’s as if an invisible weight is squeezing down on all parts of my skin, from head to toe, and my bones and muscles lock together. At the same time, another five points of awareness knock on my mind’s front door. Oryx has never done this before, it’s a violation of our agreement, I should stand up and raze him to the ground--

It’s a test.

If I have nothing to hide, why am I so afraid?

The dim light of the banquet leaves little photons to expose my grimace of panic, but I continue to remain in control of my body even as those five points of awareness turn into ten; even as they walk around the side of my mind and begin to tap on the window like fat raindrops. ~~When was the last time the realm rained? I miss the smell of it.~~ My fingers sit still, interlaced together, in my lap. Those amber eyes are quickly turning yellow, yellow like stolen bits of the sun, the sun, how I wish I could swing open the stained glass windows and poke my head out into the crisp air. I miss the weather.

I blink.

I am a god of the mind. Oryx is a god of the realm. If Oryx dares to step within my sector, _chooses_ to cross the boundaries we outlined all those millennia ago...well, who am I to deny him?

The shared mental space lurches and inverts. My mind comes crashing down onto his, and a handful of intense memories spring free from my careful protectorate. Memories of utter devotion to the glittering demon lord preceding him, recollections of trailing Oryx’s cape as he swept through the realm, every frantic scribble onto parchment as he tore through forests and kicked down hordes of the malevolent. See me, Oryx, see how I have awoken before you like the flower you so missed when you rewrite the realm into the hell it is now, would you like to see every agonizing hour of me pining over you, whispering everything that was unsaid as I sat near the bedroom window with a rippling cloth in my left hand and a needle and thread in the other? Or perhaps the half-glares at Beisa as you shared rancorous laughter with him? Would you rather see the eyerolls at Dammah's constant flair for the dramatic, my lord?

While Oryx is distracted with the storm, I pay close attention to hardening the secure pocket outside his greater awareness. Control lives in the things that are given, and I have given him the most surface level items to skim and read over. Pamphlets, really. Still the memories of this journal and heretical thought processes are locked away, secure in the small enclave that’s become more translucent as he continues to read, and read, and read.

When I am finished, I shutter the maelstrom and let it fall. He has made his choice and I have made mine. He can strike me down now, but if I am still loyal to him, then I can always rise again between the pale cobalt sheets of my bed. (There are very few times where I have not been loyal to him. Perhaps the heroes of the Realm should’ve struck me down then, but oh! They did not know who I was, let alone my existence.)

He speaks again and his eyes trail around my coronation. I suppress the urge to raise my hands to it and reseat it better on my head. Our dining table is so dull in this room after the onslaught of torrential memories. “Yes...I am beginning to see that, Leucoryx.”

“Thank you,” I whisper, because what else can I do when someone knocks at your mind and presents you with a test? I know I have succeeded, but I cannot proclaim victory until Oryx has said it explicitly. He is mercurial; he adapts, he changes, he does.

But more importantly, that’s when it strikes me, at that moment. Oryx is not one of us demigods anymore. He doesn’t feel time like any of us do and he lacks whatever semblance of morals we’ve held each other by. He’s so far removed from our scope of reality that a great many things have lost meaning to him. As I recite this now, I wonder if the Oryx that was sitting in front of me today was truly him in his complete presence, or just a darker fraction of something far more crucial to our thaumaturgic continuum. I feel regretful now. If I were simply more effective with my literature, if I held my voice stronger, if I tested their loyalty more, he would not have needed to test me. He knows that my power comes in the implicit and this entire jape was a means of confirmation.

Oryx smiled soon after I gave my thanks to his mental...examination. He came, he saw, and he needed not conquered. Now it is not just the flawless radiance of his exaltation that he wields as a tool of control, but the immediacy by which he can look deeply into me and see every fiber of my blackened soul. 

“No, archbishop. Thank you for expending your time for me,” in a slightly more tone-riddled voice.

I remain silent, and he continues.

“I’ll see you overmorrow," and he cocks his head ever so slightly to the door.

I want to spit out the words, “I am already devoted to you, your paranoia rings clear,” to him.

I want to fall to his feet and devour every flowing pulse of exalted energy he is emanating.

I want to take my telepathy as his sword, Divinity, and launch myself at his mind.

I want to grip his armor with shaking fingers and hands and beg him to save me from the void.

I want to kill him. How dare he?

I want to help him. How dare me?

I exit the dining chamber with no clattering dishware. Though the corridors are long as I traverse them, I walk swiftly to my wing and push open the door with a flattened hand. The notebook drifts slowly from my shelf and flips itself to a new page as it lands on my long, curved desk. I sit down in my chair, run my fingers across the pages, and brush at my leaking eyes. A few sniffles later and I can see so much more now--I have forgotten that Oryx is so ~~evil~~ ruthless. (He is ruthless, but only by a different lens of subjectivity can we call him evil.) Is this what my companions have faced? Has Oryx trapped Gemsbok in a fugue of poverty for a year after collapsing all the Realm’s cities to test him? Has Oryx forced Dammah to touch the Orb of Conflict as a final mark of allegiance? Has Oryx lunged at Beisa with feral glee, trying to see if the fellow gladiator still knew how to fight, until satisfied?

I must continue writing. Perhaps I have forgotten, then. All the more reason to savor and hold onto this small pocket of pure mental freedom.

I hope when I slip into bed, I do not dream; for I may only see his twin orbs of amber-gold on the slate dirt of my mindscape.


	3. Ballad(e) in the Beta Cathedral

Of the many battles I’ve fought and fended off and blazed through in a quest to offer salvation to the impure, I was struck off-guard today--perhaps literally also, if you choose to interpret the events in that way. As an agent of the mind, I cannot tell you how considerable it is that something has even managed to surprise me. (My visit to Oryx last night was a certain example of my mental fortitude, I hope.) But I suppose, with all the heresy I’ve internalized--and to an exponentially lesser degree, acted upon--consequence was lurking in the wings.

I was in my cathedral, as I’m always summoned when people step through the ghastly portal and march into my wing of the sanctuary. I’m not sure if my contemporaries take well to the continued murders of their close followers, even if they do revive themselves eventually, but I know for a fact that human-like fear strikes approximately 65% of the ones that tip up and over the precipice of death. (Kudos to Gemsbok for the speedy calculation. Not many know of his mathematical intellect, but it’s saved us many times in quickly-shifting situations.)

Still, I had to keep my gaze. Those brutes were strong today, and ferocious too, as they not only murdered my small legion with gusto but almost sprinted to the gates as each member of my clergy fell. Eventually, that raging mob blew my barrier to entry inward to me. Their speed did not falter, and so they dashed to me too. I recall one of them came so close to trip over the thick, rippling cloth of my bi-colored robe. Perhaps they would think twice before awakening me, if my arms and hands were raised into an open offering instead? But I could not dwell on their simple mistakes, for I was already perusing their minds with my quintessentially feather-light touch. Subtlety is a form of grace, and having centuries to refine my craft, not one of them knew what I saw in their radiant hearts and slick-white souls.

I was not amused.

“You have come far to meet in this holy place,” I say to them in a slow, drifting countertenor voice, “yet I sense an unrighteous energy from you...”

And so the show began.

“The only salvation here is born of blood!” I boasted grandly.

I have to admit, for all my control over the battlefield (those barriers at either ends of the room don’t come out of nowhere), the group was still cognizant. They kept sidestepping my slashes and tips of fire, and still took a keen eye to the glistening light orbs drifting around the perimeter of the room. After all, my battle is old--many who’ve surpassed me have mastered it. I cannot unravel myself into unreasonability for the slow accruement of knowledge on the sliding passage of time. My health bled away like Shaitan’s lava; slow, fiery, and weighed down with mistake.

“The corruption of your minds has misled you,” I spoke in a murmur. 

While their faces dripped with sweat and pain, I took up the veil of elegance again. A thick blue field of invulnerability stuck to me long enough to protect my lazy walk to the center of the room.

Still, mania soon seized my bodice and body, and with a glittering grin, I reassured them, “Do not worry, for I shall lay the truth bare!”

The chandeliers came to my aid, the group came closer, and we continued to battle. Thick trails of bullet-form tentacles escaped me, and my concentric holy beams paved cylinders of heat and near-death wherever they struck--with me at the center. I took on the encapsulating grasp of their profane weapons and let them rain down on me, as I have done to other groups thousands of times before. Yet it was only partway through that everything began to take a steep plunge into misfortune. Their blows were strong, yes, but their hatred was stronger. It was unlike anything I’d ever seen before. Something infernal, something grimdark, as if _I_ were the light in the dark. (Well. I am a light in the dark. But you know full well what I mean if your keen eyes have not betrayed you thus far into my text.) A quick glance at their minds showed their previously pure and iridescent auras bathing in the thick embrace of the void. They splashed and loitered in it as if it were water.

Then I could hear it.

“Leucoryx, Leucoryx, Leucoryx,” they chanted to me, “Maid of life and death. Who watches the watchmen?”

Their voices were weighed down with the worst mindsickness I had ever heard. Their song and their chant was magnitudes stronger than my dutifully-cursed texts I had in my hand at that time. My demigodhood kept the innards of my skull from bleeding straight out of my aural canals, but their influence over my body was still apparent: only half of the shots in my bullet tentacles were appearing, and the Holy Beams I was calling down did not fire all at once, but one at a time, in a lazy circle. Control was slipping out of my fingers faster than my golden mace, and it seemed like I was going to die a terrifically bloody death--if they didn’t drag me to the void first. 

A small eternity passed until a Light Orb finally came to my aid, but it did not shake the group’s demented hunger.

“Leucoryx, Leucoryx, Leucoryx,” they continued to sing to me, “made of life and death! Who watches the watchmen?”

Light Orbs are rarely warm. They’re not bright, either. All of my battles have proven their dim glow in the even dimmer dark blue hall we’ve occupied. But with the dark violet crowd writhing all around me, scrabbling at my skin and clothes with their blades and staves, that lone Orb was the brightest thing my demigod eyes had ever seen. I did not pay mind that one row was light and the other row was dark as they came down. (They’re supposed to be both light.) I did not pay mind to Lumiare deactivating and slipping out of my grasp. I felt the warmth of the Orb, like the brightest day of the Realm, so warm to strip even the blue haze of invulnerability of it’s cold. I shone, but like all ascending objects, I had to fall too, and so my dark form burst out of me just as I drank in the alien warmth.

“Very well. Some souls require more direct instruction, I see,” I said aloud. Yet with the state of their frenzied minds, I found it difficult to believe this group still had souls at all. They stepped right into the void and took on that shadowy mantle with glee. Was this a facet of magic that evaded my joint research with Leader Dammah and Dr. Terrible?

They chanted again, “Leucoryx, Leucoryx, Leucoryx. Demigod of the mind. Teach us to see!”

Very soon, it was not just the weapons they were armed to the teeth with that stung, but also their shrill and discordant voices. They paid no attention to the now-dark orbs littering the area anymore, finding more interest in lunging at me specifically.

My dark counters came soon, but it was not the legendary symphony of screaming chaos I had expected. Instead, it was screaming _order_ , a grating multi-mouthed versifier of half-clipped taunts stacked onto each other into a bizarre facsimile of melody. I used to drown others in a trance of oscillating light and dark matched to polysyllabic incantation, but only now do I see how crushing it is.

I lost control of my counter.

([How divergent my rays have become!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=170&v=-fSdvYUVJ4U&feature=youtu.be))

I broke rules.

([Those candles are so trivial to fling!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=68&v=-fSdvYUVJ4U&feature=youtu.be))

Yet they still moved.

Being the penultimate enemy before the resulting fight against Oryx, contrary to popular belief, does not carry the guarantee that we are exceedingly powerful and impervious. We tell our followers, before they’re continually struck down by the overeager grunts of the Realm, that we will hold the line where they cannot--but Oryx is not the Forgotten King, and we are not his Archmage and Sentinel, who are formidable executives by themselves. We are gatekeepers, subordinates, and tests, with strengths and flaws to be found in our counters and staggers. (Though, I really must say I do not stagger.) Surpass us and we will open the gates of our own accord.

Death came swiftly, and as my form splintered, I procured a message of regret to any ears that were still open.

“Only the sword can save you now...”

The opening of the gates does sound like a note from [ a resplendent trumpet](https://www.realmeye.com/wiki/angel-s-fanfare), doesn’t it?


	4. Archbishop and (Brain Ghost) Gladiator

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dream, Leucoryx.

Dreams have never struck me in death, but it seems like recent times have begotten new precedents. Be surprised, be not surprised; at this point it may be easier to let them pass. It has been a while since I’ve had anything new to experience, and I did mean to run my fingers through soil the next time the barren landscape came around, so maybe there is a silver lining to this.

I close my astral’s eyes, then open my mind’s eyes.

The dreamscape looked different this time. The slate gray dirt was not as packed into a smooth terrace as it is in my other dreams, and the myriad of mildly geological protrusions seemed softer in nature on the drifting horizon. The atmosphere was uplifted in a gust of warm wind, so golden that every inhale ran the risk of making me heady with pollen and slips of spring. If death could incur dreams as comforting as this, why, I wouldn’t be so opposed to that prospect.

I glanced down at myself. No wand or tome today. Only me, in my bicolored robe. I instinctively raised my hands to my coronation, only to find air and curls of hair. My eyelids fall and open again, as if to remind myself--I am in a dream. I don’t need to worry just yet, as we are only dreaming outside time. There was no one else, per usual, but something glinted in the corner of my eye, and I turned back to it. In the distance, close the horizon, a small shining figure paced around and around. Dream logic came to my aid, too; the air shimmered before me in a half-wave of obedience, and soon, I was there.

The stranger turned to me with a downquirked mouth, a firm jaw, and a pair of round brown eyes. Youthfulness leapt from his complexion. Recognition soon brightened his features, however, and he greeted me with a simple, “It’s good to see you again.”

So it seems the infernal gladiator will be today’s visitor. How...serendipitous.

I tipped my head forward and replied, “Good afternoon, my lord.”

His eyebrows pinched together for a moment as his ears caught the tail end of my reply, but I took note of it and stored it away well before his upper face slipped back into simple neutrality.

“I heard some wailing around here,” he started, “but now that I’m here, it seemed like it moved away even further still.”

“Strange. The terrain is often so silent,” I mused.

We began walking around the area in slow, short strides. There aren’t clear landmarks in this mountainous area, but we stay clear of any lighter areas of snow and ice. 

“Well...I did hear something. It was sharp, you know, like they were about to die.”

“Must’ve been the wind. The rocks lean acoustic, gladiator.”

“Must’ve been?” he echoes. There was a near-imperceptible lilt in the first half of his voice, as if he were trickling a few points from the curve of his smile into his words.

“Something like that,” I breathed out. The breeze slowed, then started back again to match our trough in dialogue.

Oryx broke the pause, but this time, in a lower voice. “Did...something happen? When you were out?”

“You’re not supposed to ask that, Oryx,” I counter in an equally low voice--though this time laced with warning. More steel wire than white thread. It’s difficult to hint out mild annoyance to a person who normally often wears an occlusive helmet, but I continued on resolute; I was even able to dig the tips of my shoes into the dirt and kick up a few grams of soil as we moved. I didn’t want to tarnish these few moments where I can halt the spin of the Realm as it screams into the open void, but he kept marching on, indomitable to the few attempts I sniped his way in an attempt to subdue him.

“Why not?” he whispered.

Another exhale escaped my nostrils. He is so, so, so innocent. So wondrously shielded from everything else outside this mental projection. Why, if I were here a century ago, I would try to corrupt him--somehow. But I am not who I am a hundred years ago, and instead, I had to fight the urge to completely slash away any connections to my waking self’s memories and hold his jaw and cheek in a loose grasp forever. I wanted to cherish this shade of mine, born from the silently mortal bits of his namesake’s soul and living out in my own psyche.

Below me, the slate dirt continued to tug and try to bind me to their organic grasp, but I only feel his fingers around my palm. Our walk has slowed considerably, and his attention is truly sweeping my way now. Where he stares, he also burns: my cheeks come aflame in his line of vision, beyond any grasp of control I may offer to the projection of my dream self. That is the humorous thing about dreams, even for me, as we are more often passengers of unconscious storytelling than conductors to a hypnagogic symphony.

Even in this dreamscape, it’s laborious to regard those brown eyes. 

“I know you called me here. _Me._ So what did you call me for?” he continued.

Shards of ice leapt into my voice as I said, “I didn’t call you here. Shades like you oft come of your own accord.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“Which part? That you’re a shade, or that you come of your accord?”

“Leuc. What happened? There’s no one else here, it’s okay.” His reassurances slipped out of those youthful vocal cords like honey and gold. If I weren’t paying attention, I might almost have missed the growing heat where his hands found mine.

I wanted to tell him, so badly, you know. I wanted to say that the beast outside, lurking in the matter-filled microcosm outside, knocked at my mind and forced me to open (or else). I wanted to say that the person I spent so many centuries worshipping no longer became a person, and I was the last person to realize that, even after all the heroes of the Realm. I wanted to say that things are slipping through my fingers. I wanted to say I am deathly afraid of those void-drunk heroes, and the very void itself, who always tries to grab at my hems whenever I go under. I wanted to say, in no florid dialogue, that I was sorry, that I wanted to tell him everything, that I wanted him to be the muse of my journaling (oh, how ironic), but there was no guarantee that talking to him would have been free from my lord’s omniscience.

He brought a finger to my lips.

So he does know, then. I suppose I can’t expect anything less for a shade of the de facto supreme being throughout the dimensions. Thus, I began in allegory. He’s more than able to figure it out.

“There’s a god out there, whose veins are filled with liquid plasma instead of blood or ichor like us both. He sings a melody of destruction in the blade he swings in circular lyrics against his ever-tenacious enemies, and he knocked on my door yesterday. He asked to enter, pleasant enough with that mask of his, and I had to oblige even when every other cube in my body was screaming in protest--not just denial, but also pleading and sorrowful hiccups. He rifled through all my books and upturned every cushion in my chairs and sofas, then checked the curtains for dust and looked out each window, keeping that stony face all the while. I didn’t know if he would leave at all,” I said in a wavering marathon of narration. No iteration of me will ever admit imperfection, but the world of dreams is not so bound to the strict self-control I place on myself in the world of wakefulness. 

“He doesn’t sound pleasant,” he said in an uncharacteristic litote.

“Oh, he used to be,” I offered.

“Did something happen to him too?”

“It was something of dominoes. Things happened one after the other and I couldn’t stop the fall in time.”

Oryx has caught on soon enough, but he’s still playing along. He can see the delicate situation as it sits before him, wrapped in a two-colored robe and a neutral gaze on a person who never should have made it this far at all, and he knows it too, when he pulled me in and dropped his sword with a thunk. Briefly I wondered if the blade would dull from dropping it to the ground, but then his grip tightened, and so too did his face inch in close to my head, pressing all extraneous thoughts out and away. Without armor, his stiff tunic digs through my clothing and into my side. Even in the deepest pockets of my mind, my body is soft.

A tone of finality glissaded into his voice as he asked, “You told me you liked happy endings a while ago. Do you still like them?”

Rain began to fall in pitter-pattering, soft sheets. Although neither of us had umbrellas, only a few drops of water could skitter down the crests of our faces. Nestled in him, I shifted my face to keep out whatever empty space threatened to peek between us.

“Well, they’re one of the few things keeping me sane.”

The air remained uplifted in a gust of warmth and spring pollination, the rocks and ice kept their soft outlines on the horizon, and the slate gray dirt was pillowy even as our weight tamped on it. The ever-rarer tufts of grass still remained vibrant and beautiful, with such a verdant gaze that they could be my own eyes in this whimsical expanse, and his double heartbeat pumped in a luxuriously slow, calming pattern. It was difficult to remain standing as heavy cobalt flooded my blood and muscles, and right before my visual range fell completely, I felt a soft touch at the top of my head.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Had to put this at the end to avoid spoilers, but the "Brain Ghost" moniker comes from Homestuck's own portrayal of particularly strong mental shades, but within the work itself, Leucoryx doesn't refer to the Oryx that comes to him in dreams as a "brain ghost"--probably because it's a misnomer. ;)

**Author's Note:**

> Feedback is very welcome! If you're giving criticism/improvements, my only request is to keep things cordial.


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